A Sacred Substack Slow Down

Healing our Collective Nervous System: Invitations for an Embodied Post-Capitalist Revolution on Substack

Opening Substack each day feels like a pre-dawn pilgrimage to Pele in 2017. Standing before the gushing lava, ground shaking and hot, lava poured out cliffside and gathered on the ocean floor generating entirely new virgin Earth. The sheer abundance of revolutionary thinking; from post-capitalist frameworks to deep philosophy, anarchist nature lovers to heterodox interpretations of our current political moment, Earth regenerators to visionaries of open source futures, creates an immense tension in my nervous system – a hunger to consume it all, to gather the full picture, to keep pace with this explosion of collective awakening. Like a river that has jumped its banks or a volcano pouring it’s insides out, I notice my nervous system surges with the overwhelming flow of information, wisdom, and possibility. And while I love reading writers who consider all beings to be people, the human nervous system is extremely disregulated right now.

I’ve begun to notice this abundance, this rushing flow toward revolution through endless notes and newsletters, replicates the same capitalist patterns of consumption we're trying to transcend. When our bodies remain stuck in chronic stress, constantly scanning for the next executive order, the next breakthrough insight, we forget our natural rhythm of rest and activation. I've found myself drowning in the fire hose of brilliance on Substack, my nervous system churning with the familiar frequency of "there’s not enough time” and “must go faster”— classical rhythms of capitalism’s cacophony.

This afternoon, just before gaining the inspiration to tap out these words, I recognized tension in my neck as I was devouring Substacks one after another as if I were 20 again and they were 5 cent wings at happy hour. Instead of drinking a beer and watching a game, I’m gathering a wider view of our current moment, a more comprehesive understanding of what the f*** is going on and how to subvert the subversion. The neck crick spoke to me and said, “pause.” So, I stopped reading, adjusted my body and remembered ‘cultural somatics’ and “GONG,” I was hit with this, again: “true revolution requires slowing down.”

Our nervous systems possess an extraordinary capacity for change, but only transform when we create the conditions for neural reorganization. When I finally began treating each paragraph in the newsletter I was reading like a meditation rather than a task of consumption– reading one paragraph, breathing, letting it settle into my fascia– something shifted. Each deliberate breath became a reminder of reassurance to my vigilant nervous system, teaching it that: like music exists in the gaps between notes, parasympathetic social engagement and safety exists in the spaces between words.

Despite my deep immersion in nervous system wisdom - my daily work of guiding others through their somatic landscapes - I too get caught in culture's oldest spell: the breathless rush of perpetual urgency. Like a healer who forgets to drink water, I find myself swept into these ancient patterns of collective trauma, my own system accelerating to match a rhythm I know in my bones to be unsustainable.

This slowing down isn't just personal though – it's also politcal. The open-source sharing of wisdom and knowledge on Substack represents a beautiful rebellion against capitalist scarcity. Yet for this shared knowledge to truly revolutionize our collective consciousness, we must resist the urge to consume it at capitalism's preferred pace. Like a garden that flourishes in the quiet spaces between the tending, our nervous systems require moments of deliberate stillness to catalyze their deepest healing. Each breath between paragraphs becomes an act of resistance against the attention economy.

The resistance I feel to this slower pace is a reflection of our collective struggle. Do you notice it too? Our minds, conditioned by years of rushing, interpret slowness as a threat to survival. These fears aren't just thoughts – they're biologically protective mechanisms born from our survival instincts, from a system that has taught us that worth comes from productivity rather than presence. And for many of us, moving fast and filling our lives with urgency allows us to avoid the somatic experience of the present moment. For anyone keenly aware of our current cultural moment, there’s a lot of pain nested within it- deep grief many of us, consciously and unconsciously, would prefer not to feel beacuse it’s inconvenient and or a threat to identity.

This revolution isn't just about new ideas or connecting with as many like-minded individuals and communities as possible – it's about new ways of metabolizing knowledge- new ways of metabolizing life that are in alignment with nature and our truest expression of humanness. When we honor the need for slowness, each digested peice of wisdom becomes not just information but incarnation- savory, settled, and integrated. Learning deepens when we give ourselves space to absorb and integrate. Just as our bodies process food most effectively when we eat slowly and mindfully, our nervous systems integrate transformation most powerfully when we give them time to digest each new understanding.

The science speaks clearly: when we remain stuck in chronic stress, our bodies enter a state of limbic system impairment, where threat detectors become overreactive to both internal and external environments. This keeps us locked in cycles of inflammation and dysregulation. Yet through neuroplasticity – our brain's ability to reorganize and form new neural connections – we can rewrite these patterns. The key lies not in forcing change but in creating the conditions for natural reorganization through conscious deceleration.

This is more than a reading strategy – it's a revolutionary practice. The power to transform our world has always resided in our ability to fully embody new paradigms. Perhaps the most radical act is allowing ourselves to slow down enough to let truth penetrate beyond our intellectual understanding, into the very fabric of our being. In this sacred deceleration, we don't just read about revolution – we become it, one conscious breath at a time.

Through this practice of revolutionary slowness, we're not just changing our relationship to information – we're rewiring our fundamental relationship with existence. We’re aligning with Natural Law. Each moment of conscious slowness becomes a portal to deeper presence, each breath an invitation to remembering our body's innate wisdom. In this space of deliberate deceleration, we don't just heal ourselves – we contribute to the healing of our collective nervous system, creating new possibilities for how we might live and learn together in this post-capitalist dawn.

With Love,

Patrick